The Sum Of All
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: Extended Version. The natives of Yardrat are an altruistic people, who share a semi-collective consciousness, but recently their society has been under attack. When an injured alien lands in their midst, they are forced to make hard decisions.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: This is a longer version of the contest drabble I posted a few weeks ago. I've since decided to expand this fic to the length of three or four chapters, the next of which I am currently working on. I hope that this new version is more interesting and readable than the old.

_**The Sum of All**_

The alien's flat, recessed eyes fluttered shut, and - curiosity overcoming their initial fear - the people crept back in to study it.

"Is it dead?" one individual asked the rest of the assembly, as a second bent to place the palm of his hand on the alien's chest.

He felt life quivering under the hard muscle and bone with an uneven beat. "No," he said, and when he lifted his hand it came away streaked with blood and soot. He looked over his shoulder, back at the trail of destruction that the alien's ship had torn through the city, and the rest of the people turned as one to look with him.

Another picked up the thread of his thought. "There's more than are needed here," she said, "and there may be some who are injured or trapped within those buildings." Three-quarters of the crowd nodded in agreement, and peeled off from the group to join the growing teams assembling around the damaged buildings.

The seven remainders were left starting down at the unconscious alien. "What is it?" one person said, and another built on the question by saying, "Why is it here?" while a third asked, "Where did it come from?" and a forth said, "What happened to it? What hurt it?" and the assembly as a whole began to sway anxiously as the questions piled upon one another unanswered.

One individual spoke above the mounting voices. He had the jittery manner of one who'd lost too many comrades to tragedy, and no longer knew exactly to whom he was connected. "I believe that it's of a kind with those who attacked Eastern Collective last year."

The rest of the assembly, six in all, looked for one to the other, reaching a quick and grim consensus. "Tell us everything," one said. Another added, "We can't act appropriately without knowing."

Those who'd witnessed the attack firsthand had deemed the details too distressing to be disseminated among the wider population, and now the six who'd known little of the matter before understood why; the imagines that flooded the communal space between their private consciousnesses were the sort that changed an individual's ability to interact with others forever. One would always be isolated, knowing of such horrible things in such awful detail, out of fear of harming others with that knowledge.

The strangers had been shadow-minded things, shallow and cheerful killers, and they hadn't been slowed by reason argument or the pleas of children. It had been impossible to reach any sort of understanding with them, let alone consensus. They'd been driven away, but not before no less than a quarter million individuals had been killed. There was no knowing when they might return in greater numbers.

"We should learn from them, and do as they did," the one who'd been there himself said, "and kill it while it's helpless."

The six who were new to the idea began once again to sway. "It doesn't look like them," one said. "How could they have been together?"

"None of the strangers from before looked similar," another said, slowly, because this was a point of great puzzlement for them all.

"They wore the same style of clothing. They were alike in that."

"This one's garbed differently," someone said, pointing at the dirty orange tatters the alien wore around its waist.

"The vessel is the same."

"If we could ask it what it wanted…" one ventured, but another cut him off discordantly.

"If it's allowed to wake it might do violence. The others didn't mind killing children."

"Be calm," someone said, peevishly. "This helps nothing."

The one who'd dared to first touch the alien lifted his arms for silence. "We're off-track," he said. "The question is: Were the strangers part of us?"

The response was quick and unanimous. "No, they were no part of us."

Catching the flow, another said, "You can't take up the ways of someone else without becoming part of him. Do we want that for ourselves?"

"I don't," one said. "Why should we change ourselves at their prompting?"

"We aren't meant to kill helpless people who haven't done us any intentional harm."

"That's them. It isn't us. We're the people here together, and we aren't like them."

A last said, "I won't allow strangers change us into something we don't want to be."

They took care of the alien, until it was well enough to go back to its own people.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two 

The alien had proven to be too heavy and too badly injured to be carried indoors. One of the assembly had gone ahead to make a place for it, and when the allotted amount of time had passed the rest had used her as an anchor to transmit themselves and the alien also to the dormitories. A second strategic transmission had placed it in the invalid's bed, though the alien was a poor fit there, its heavy limbs dangling over the edges of the mattress.

Four of the assembly moved in around the alien, adjusting arms and legs, trying to finagle its over-sized form into some more comfortable-looking position while it slept on. Another began to gather medical supplies, piling disinfectants and bandages, along with clean towels and a basin of hot water, on the bedside table. A sixth leaned over the alien, trying to fit an oxygen mask over its face, but the bump of bone and cartilage that shielded its nostrils kept the thing from fitting properly.

The last stood at the window, his back to the others as he looked down at the recovery efforts among the shattered buildings. That would be hard going, they all knew; inside the unmapped jumbles of broken concrete and twisted metal it would be impossible to perform shunkan ido, and the injured would lack the mental focus and physical strength to transport themselves to freedom. The search would have to be manual, each piece of rubble moved with painstaking caution with equipment or by hand.

"There are bodies," he told the rest of the group. "Three so far."

"Don't say it," another whispered, "It may hear you."

"There's no aiding the dead," the one with the oxygen mask added distractedly. She pressed at the bump over the alien's nostrils from different angles, looking to see if it could be moved aside, but it would neither deflate or fold back.

Another coaxed, "Comrade, you're needed here. It is so heavy." The last turned away from the sight of the broken bodies being drawn from the rubble, not at all unlike what he'd seen during the pervious year's attack on the Eastern Collective, and joined the other down by the alien's feet. "Lift," he was told, and so hefted the alien's legs up while the other striped off the tattered and blood-soaked pants. Next, he tugged on the elastic band of the undergarment, but then let it snap back into place abruptly. He took a step back, swaying.

"Is there a wound?" the one holding up the alien's legs asked, when he saw the other's alarm and confusion.

"There is not," he said, as the others, who had been busy cleaning the blood and dirt from the alien's bruise-speckled upper-half, looked up to watch him.

"What, then?"

"I don't know," he said, "but I don't care for it." And then he added, "Better to leave those there."

"Comrades?" the one who was working near the alien's head said, and the rest turned toward the call. "Your help? I can't seem to get this to come off," she said, and demonstrated the problem by giving the black mass of fibers that topped the alien's head a tug.

"Is it glued?" someone speculated, as the assembly crowded up around its head to examine this problem for themselves.

"What's it for, anyway?" another individual asked.

"Maybe it's to make its head look bigger," a third ventured to guess, and another agreed, "It really is very small."

"Small head and everything else too big," someone else added.

"Can't blame it for being ugly, though," one individual said, to chided murmurs of agreement. Moving more boldly than the others, he buried his hands wrists deep in the black mass, digging his fingers through it gingerly to feel along the crown of the head for some sort of buckle of seam. "It scratches," he observed, unhappily.

"It won't come off," the one who'd witnessed the attack on the Eastern Collective said. "It grows like so, from the skin."

"Ah, I see that now," the other said, and withdrew his fingers from the tangle of black fibers. The alien stirred at the inadvertent tugging, batting vaguely at the space around its head. The people shied away, dodging its open palm, and waited to see if it would wake.

When its eyes fluttered open, vague with fatigue, the people drew back a little further, but only briefly. Its mind was fuzzy and almost entirely unreadable, but reassuring in its docility. When it laid still, watching them as passively as a sleepy infant, they moved in with the clean towels again, to scrub gently at the grime that coated its skin.

Under the layers of dirt and dried blood bruises blossomed across the alien's body by the dozens. They were purple and greenish against his tan skin, with swirls of red, and the abrasions were rust-red, or else brownish-black with pinker tinges around the edges. They murmured in alarm as each new wound came to light, speculative half-thoughts bouncing between them as they tried to make sense of it all, but they spoke softly; the alien was flirting in and out of consciousness, and they'd no wish to disturb it more than was necessary.

"It is so big," one of the them said, for perhaps the fifth time; it bore repeating, because the alien was truly massive, half-again as tall as the Yardratjin, and at least three times as heavy as any single individual. "What could have done this to it?"

"And why?" another said, lifting the alien's heavy paw to clean it. She dropped it just as quickly, reeling away from the alien with her own palm pressed over her mouth, fighting back waves of nausea.

"What is it?" one demanded, while another begged, "Please, Comrade. If you vomit I will too." They all moved back, watching the alien watch them guilelessly.

"Look at its hands," she said, though she herself could hardly bear to do so again. "Look at what it did to itself."

The one who'd been at the Eastern Collective attack stepped forward and lifted the giant palm, turning it over in his own hands while he watched the alien out of the corner of his eye for signs of distress or aggression. The knuckles were swollen, the skin and muscle so badly abraded that the white of bone showed through in places. Bones were obviously broken in at least two places. "I told you," he said, releasing the alien's hand gently and backing off to stand with the rest of the assembly. He said it in a strange way, as though he were speaking only to himself and no one else.

"I _didn't_ understand," she said, distraught and outraged. "I don't understand. How am I suppose to understand _that_?"

The alien lurched its way into a sitting position on the bed. There were chunks of bone set like blades in its gums, and as it struggled to move it ground them together in apparent pain. "_Hey,_" it said, a guttural and rough-throated sound. Nearly as shallow-minded as an animal, it was difficult to know its intent, let alone its meaning, yet there seemed to be nothing aggressive about it. It held its damaged hand out in supplication, intent on the agitation of the one who'd first noticed the injury. It said again, "_Hey,_" and gestured with stiff fingers at the rolls of gauze, which were just outside of its reach.

"We'll send it back," one said, slipping forward to hand it what it wanted before shying back to join the group again, as the alien, grimacing, began to wrap the gauze tightly around its hand, forcing the misaligned knuckles back into place and holding them there. It tore the gauze with its mouth, then leaned back against the pillows, breathing hard. "Just as soon as it's well enough to go, we'll send it back to where it belongs."

And in the silent consent that followed that statement, the alien's stomach growled.


End file.
